Vintage Folk Rock Kit - BFD Pack

The Vintage Folk Rock Kit is an awesome kit for a 60s / 70s Folk Rock or Indie rock sound. We used the engineering skills of the legendary engineer / producer Phill Brown (Laura Marling / John Martyn / Rolling Stones) whose indepth knowledge of recording bands during these years helped mould the sound of the kit. The Kit used was a beautiful old 1966 Ludwig Hollywood kit and it was setup by legendary drumtech Martin Oldham. To direct us on the sound of the kit we used Folk specialist drummer Martyn Barker (Rufus Wainwright, Richard Hawley, Katherine Williams) who sampled the kit using sticks, hotrods and brushes which effectively gives you three kits - nice !

For the sound Phill Brown (John Martyn, Bob Marley, Rolling Stones, Talk Talk, Led Zeppelin) used his years of accumulated knowledge and went back to the time of the 60s when he was based at Olympic Studios. Phill’s idea was to create a 1960s drum sound with a modern twist. Instead of positioning the microphones close to the kit he wanted to capture a natural drum sound and record the ‘dead’ room. He used only five microphones on the kit: one on the kick, the snare, two kit microphones placed around the kit which provide a surprisingly good stereo picture, and a mono overhead. All of the mics were recorded through API mic pre's.

The kit was recorded in the drier sounding room at Livingston (we saved the liver room for the Modern Folk Rock Kit ). Although the sound is controlled, it has a great ambience around it. Livingston has been used to record a multitude of hit records over the years and is well known for being one of London’s top drum rooms.

The kit we used for this was a beautiful vintage 1966 Ludwig Hollywood Kit. It is almost identical to the Super Classic kit which Ringo Starr once used, except it has two rack toms rather than just the one. These are beautiful sounding kits. The snare used was a 1967 wooden Ludwig Snare owned by Martyn. We also include some tambourine and shaker articulations.

What Is the BFD Pack?

The BFD Pack is a sampler pack that can be loaded into FXpansions BFD2 or BFD3. It contains 47 articulations and the kit has been recorded in up to 120 velocity steps. The pack contains 14450 samples. You have full control over the five microphones that were used to record this kit and once loaded into BFD you can enjoy all the same features that you would expect from any other BFD kit. Once the kit has been recognized by BFD, just simply select your desired kit piece from the list in the same way that you would load any other drum in BFD. This pack also includes 15 Groove Palettes. These are split into 317 4-Bar Folk Loops played by Martyn Barker.